Creating a sales situation in the mortgage and real estate business rests on credibility and the strength of the relationship. Understanding how your clients view your profession, both good and bad, is key to knowing what relationship barriers you need to overcome. Do you know what negative images you must dispel in order to rocket your customer relationships forward?

The first step in the counter intuitive self promotion campaign is to list all the things about mortgage loan officers that people find frustrating. Then introduce step two, which is your personal work habits or expertise that overcomes these barriers - get on the same side of the table!

Your real estate website’s agent bio page is actually a good page to sell yourself in this way. By listing the negative things that happen in loan transactions, you show yourself to be an experienced loan officer who looks ahead so as not to be caught unawares by potential closing disasters.

Address early the frustrations of not knowing where in the loan process the client is and how long the process should take. Give your clients information upfront on the possible delays and what steps need to be taken to overcome basic obstacles. This can be a helpful mortgage guide that you offer for free on your home loan website.

Touch-base phone calls and email reminders can seem like nagging unless your clients are informed in advance the steps and timing you have found necessary to land a loan on time. Always couch the steps in terms of advancing their dream, not just to get the job done. People will absorb the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as long as they can keep their eye on the great benefit at the end of the process.

List all the other frustrations you hear from people who go through the loan process. Bring them up in your bio and then show, preferably with testimonials, how you help your clients avoid these financing pitfalls. Testimonials from real estate agents as well as satisfied clients add tremendous weight to your loan officer biography.

Often, the problem we face reading our biographies is that we know them from our perspective too well. When going over your website biography, try to read it from the perspective of your potential client. See if you have made your strongest points, not about your best mortgage officer features, but about your clients’ benefits. Counter intuitive as it sounds, your website biography should be mostly about your customers, not you.

The luxury residential real estate prices continue to rise, contrary to the general market contraction. According to the recent report on luxury and high-end homes from Christie’s Great Estates, luxury homes selling around the country at record setting prices.

In the Colorado real estate market, luxury real estate in mountain communities such as Bachelor Gulch, Beaver Creek, and Vail have seen homes for sale keep pace with national luxury home price trend and sell for record amounts. In Telluride Mountain Village, 2007 prices were over 10% higher than the 2006 prices. Boulder County has also seen real estate values increase on the high-end properties.

The Florida real estate market’s Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast have seen increases in both demand and prices for high-end homes. Hawaii, which overall saw a 10% decline in home sales in 2007, enjoyed a 14% increase in sales of high-end properties in the same period. On the East Coast, Europeans, Mid-easterners and a growing number of South Americans form the majority of the foreign buyers. In the West Coast and Hawaii markets, Australia and the Asian Pacific countries dominate. With expected changes easing the ability to obtain visas, China and South Korea are poised to become a larger part of the market. Both markets enjoy a resurgence of Canadian buyers now that the Canadian dollar is on par with the American dollar.

In the competitive world of Internet real estate marketing, blogs, neighborhood news tools and email “new property” notifications are standard. In order to stand out, websites are putting more emphasis on editorial content. To take advantage of the international interest in American luxury properties, real estate websites have adapted by adding more information on their niche market through very informative area luxury lifestyle guides and currency converters.

The market appeal to the luxury home buyer is not based so much on school locations, value and price, as on the lifestyle the home affords. Price is part of the picture, of course, but with 28% of foreign buyers purchasing their luxury property for cash (20% more than US buyers), price is not a hurdle. Real estate websites that add content on an area’s high-end life style amenities help create the market through their attractive and educational presentation.

Successful real estate agents in the luxury market know the power of Internet marketing as a foundation to their traditional marketing methods of colorful flyers and networking with associates. Starting with their own real estate website, designed to appeal to high-end buyers, they also utilize high visibility websites such as the Wall Street Journal’s website and the NAR’s website to steer traffic to their website. With many luxury home buyers leading “movable feast” lifestyles, the Internet is one stable real estate information source for the luxury market, where ever it may be.

For real estate agents, getting qualified real estate leads from the Internet can be a frustrating, time consuming process. Buying leads from Internet real estate lead generation companies often brings the same dismal 1% hit rate of a massive direct marketing campaign. A 1% return means sifting through a lot of gravel to find the few sapphires. Savvy real estate agents are finding that the Internet itself can qualify, as well as generate, real estate leads.

Use these time tested techniques to maximize the return on your internet marketing investment:

1. Rely on your own personal real estate website to generate leads. The benefit of a personal site is that it:

• Your website is search engine optimized to your real estate market and area of expertise;
• You control the content and can update the content without waiting for IT;
• Works for you 24/7 and follows you to whichever real estate broker you work with.

2. Work with a real estate web design company with proven search engine optimization methods. You know real estate is a competitive marketplace; high ranking in the search engines is a must. Unlike the traditional marketing, where you want to be the last real estate agent a client talks to, on the Internet, you want to be the first.

3. Use your auto responder to quickly follow-up a lead with your contact information, but then give them a benefit, something useful, with another email. For instance, give information of homes in your listing or interesting articles in your blog or neighborhood news area of your website. Then follow up with a phone call. These are most likely those basic steps you already take to establish “mindshare”, just make sure you do them consistently and in a timely manner.

4. Monitor your lead responses. Track the number of calls and internet leads and the outcomes of those leads. Use your feedback to tweak information on your site, possibly target new keywords, fine tune follow-up techniques and assess where to invest marketing funds to most effectively expand your Internet presence.

Your real estate website is the technology to help you generate leads from a fast-growing segment of the real estate market - the Internet buyer. As well as your website is designed to build a relationship (even if virtual at first) through its information, your follow-up techniques to this powerful lead generating tool are the key to its maximum success.

Internet marketing or eCommerce is a — powerful tool that real estate brokerages can leverage to increase lead generation from their real estate websites. A best of all possible worlds may be all the sales agents attached to a real estate brokerage showing property and closing deals. Not spending any time finding and qualifying leads. Admittedly an unrealistic scenario, but by scientifically positioning your real estate website’s message, you can get closer to that perfect world.

Positioning #1:
Talk to each client. Traditional advertising takes the shotgun approach a blasting a general message to a general segment of the population. Internet marketing, by its nature, is one-to-one marketing. In your message use the keywords that an individual looking for a specific piece of real estate will use. Maybe only 10 people in your market use those keywords in a month, but when they contact you, they are a qualified lead looking for exactly what you have to offer.

Positioning #2:
Measure and adapt. Use your keywords in a testing of the market manner. Measure the traffic certain keywords or pages draw to your site. Tweak pages or keywords with low draw and create more pages with the keywords successfully driving real estate leads to your website.

Positioning #3:
Don’t profile. This goes against the prevalent advertising strategy of targeting demographics. Internet marketing is most successful when it targets a buyer’s or seller’s behavior or activity. For example, instead of targeting middle income, male, householders, target people looking to buy their dream home in the mountains near a skiing resort or on the waterfront near boating access ramps. No one does searches for real estate using the keywords “homes for sale for male householder”, but they do search for “Breckenridge mountain real estate near ski resort”.

Positioning #4:
Utilize the Internet’s capacity for interactivity. Your real estate website client used the mouse and keyboard to arrive at your site. The brain is in the typing, clicking mode. Make your call to action initially a call to simply type or click to request information of give contact information. Do not push them to call initially. Keep them on your real estate website. The more information a website visitor reads on your site, the more likely they will convert into a warm sales lead.

Several successful real estate companies redefined their marketing position by measuring the warm leads directed to sales. Traditional marketing that was ineffective in attracting leads fell in the category of “not doing your job”. By following these simple Internet marketing positioning steps, your brokerage office can harvest the leads generated from the site and feed them to sale agents. Real estate sales agents working on warm leads close more sales than the ones who are trying to find the leads that saw a magazine ad and are thinking of buying in the near future.

A benefit in the current real estate market correction is that there is time to check your real estate connections. Invest time and energy in your lead generation tracking and cleaning up your client database.

A good leads database is 400 contacts, give or take 100. Most agents do not have clean usable lists. With the real estate technology tools, having email addresses for all your contacts is necessary. Most real estate agents only have email addresses for 50% of their contacts. Upgrading your contacts database is key to streamlining your connecting to your active client pool. Sending monthly touch-base emails on market opportunities and trends is a way to keep the referral and connection pot simmering.

In times of down market, the tendency is to cut expenses, such as marketing expenses. However, down markets are the prime time to make sure everyone is aware of your real estate business. Try doubling the mileage on your real estate website with the following simple two step program. First step, add pages of content regarding the local real estate market and insightful entries on your real estate blog. Second step, email a list of your connections and invite them to check the new material on your real estate website, add a note of appreciation for past business and referrals and then ask them for any new referrals or to forward your website link to friends. Be specific about the material on the website so your contacts know there is “must read” content, not just something new.

Even though financial experts think that the tightening of mortgage lending standards will drop 25% of the population out of the home buying market and into the rental market, it still leaves 75% in the real estate market who can meet the tighter mortgage standards. Best of all, by getting your connections database cleaned up, you are better positioned for when the market picks back up steam as expected in the end of 2008. And more people will have your real estate website’s address.

Real estate agents and brokerages need to pull out all the stops to effectively keep their real estate websites positioned on Google and Yahoo, the two leading search engines, and to adapt to market trends in today’s slow real estate market. There is a two pronged real estate situation causing some real estate agents to get corralled into unproductive labor to secure listings.

Google and Yahoo have apparently tweaked their search algorithms to give priority in front page ranking to mega real estate websites such as Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com. The slow down and price drop in the housing market has caused 12% more of the sellers in the market to try the “for sale by owner” route, instead of listing with a real estate agent.

With listing information more available and a slow housing market, some real estate agents have taken to painting houses, doing clean up and maintenance to build relationships and win listings. While extra help, such as giving a client a lift back to work after a showing, is usual, recent efforts to secure clients has raised liability and loss of sales time concerns.

Is there a better way to roll with the internet marketing punches? Yes. Trulia has a free linking section and an Agent Feature Listing program that provides even more opportunity to funnel traffic to your personal real estate website. Realtor.com also has a feature allowing real estate agents that are MLS participants (and who’s Multiple Listing Service must be a REALTOR.com® data content provider) the ability to upgrade their listings with more photos, contact information and web links. Zillow allows real estate agents to add their picture and contact information, such as your website, to your listings for free. Top real estate companies such as RE/MAX and Prudential are actively utilizing Trulia’s additional market reach.

The Trulia Voices section allows real estate agents to further their market presence by answering questions from active buyers and sellers. In your answer, you have an opportunity to guide the reader back to your website for further information. Most effective, of course, is finding the questions from people in your market area. Trulia Voices can also serve as part of your market feedback loop. After reviewing questions posted to the site, you can create an informative blog entry on your real estate website and direct your reader to that entry in your answer.

According to Trulia, 68% of their visitors checking their website listings are not working with a real estate agent yet. By increasing your visibility on Trulia and Zillow, you can ride your part of the 10 million visitors a month wave and harness Zillow’s and Trulia’s commanding search engine presence to capture those untethered warm sales leads.

By integrating Trulia and Zillow into your internet marketing strategy, you gain exposure to a larger market that can show your listings, but better still, drive traffic to your real estate website so you can capture the leads. The greater visibility translates to the potential for a faster sale. Real estate agents now have even more to offer the “sale by owner” sellers who would willingly trade their perceived savings for the quicker sale.

When providing material for your real estate website, beware of two copywriting traps that diminish the effectiveness of your website content.

Trap #1: Writing for other real estate agents.
Every profession develops shorthand words, initials or acronyms for part of their daily process or products. Keep in mind that your new home buyers, which may be 40% of the traffic your real estate website receives, are novices. They do not necessarily understand real estate acronyms that are second nature to real estate agents. Writing over someone’s head leaves them feeling like they need to use another agent who is used to talking on an introductory level. Especially do not write as if your material is going in a classified ad where everything has been broken down into a type of classified ad shorthand.

On the other hand, if you are real estate website targeting practiced commercial and investment buyers, you can use a certain level of market specific language to prequalify your potential clients.

Trap #2: Writing page content as if it is a blog entry.
Blog entries can be written in a more conversational style. When writing content for a webpage, make sure you are using a descriptive adjectives and keyword nouns instead of pronouns. Actually, keeping this in the back of your mind will help you write better blog entries.

When reviewing client testimonials, tweak their quotes to add punch (keeping it in their style of talking/writing, of course) and get them to approve of the changes. A positive testimonial such as “He was a great guy to work with and we are very happy with our new house,” can be tweaked for the search engines with minor edits. A better testimonial would read “Seymour Lystings was a great real estate agent to work with and we are very happy with our lovely new Denver home in the Cherry Creek neighborhood.” This adds your name and three keywords: “real estate agent”, “Denver home” and “Cherry Creek neighborhood”. Hopefully your testimonials are a little longer also!

With these copywriting traps out of the way, the real estate information on your website should appeal to first time buyers as well as seasoned home buyers. Don’t worry about getting your explanations too simple, your seasoned buyers will skim over that text to find what they need.